Over this weekend and by noon today, 82,000 Americans signed a petition sponsored by Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) and two other members of the House Judiciary Committee, Reps. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), calling on that committee and its chairman, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) to begin immediate hearings on Rep. Dennis Kucinich's bill to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney.

There was no report in the nation's corporate media on the three Judiciary Committee members' call (they are three senior members of the House Democratic Party), and no report on the remarkable public response to their petition.

As always when the story involves impeachable crimes by the Bush administration, the corporate media have been silent, devoting their pricey news minutes and their precious column inches to meaningless stories about the twin horseraces for the presidential nomination, which themselves have blacked out any word of the main crowd-pleasers in those campaigns: Republican Ron Paul and Democrat Kucinich.

Impeachment is the elephant in the room. Everyone knows that this country is being run by a criminal syndicate that has rigged elections, hidden its knowledge of the 9-11 attacks, lied the country into war, plotted to out an important CIA undercover operative and then obstruct a criminal investigation into that treasonous act, subverted most of the articles of the Bill of Rights, emasculated the Congress and the Courts (which it has also shamelessly packed with shameless hacks), betrayed veterans, surrendered a major American metropolis to the devastation of a hurricane, plotted to enable the declaring of martial law, tortured kidnapped and killed people in violation of international law and obstructed efforts to deal with the unprecedented crisis of global warming for an unconscionable seven years.

But the media won't allow any talk of holding this administration to account. It's not just that we are being told that the only power and duty we as citizens have is to vote once every two or four years (after which we are supposed to shut up and consume), but that we are not to be told about, or are being encouraged not to talk about these larger crimes that are occurring, and worsening, day by day.

Impeachment isn't just off the table in the Congress. It is off the table in the media and thus in public discourse.

This is intolerable. It is only because of the alternative media that those 82,000 citizens knew of and signed onto Rep. Wexler's courageous call for impeachment hearings on Kucinich's equally courageous bill.

We as citizens should not just be haranguing our representatives to demand that they support impeachment hearings. We should be picketing our local news organizations and deluging them with calls and letters demanding that they stop the censorship and report the news honestly without fear or favor, as they are supposed to do. ______________________ READ DAVE LINDORFF'S LETTER to the ombudsman at the New York Times: